8 Tommy
The slab seal hissed open, and the last of Nadia’s potion burned out of my blood.
The sudden rush of Kaia’s scent filled every corner of my mind. The mate bond slammed home like a door blown off its hinges in a backdraft. A hook set behind my sternum, dragging me forward, and I staggered back into the foam wall of the booth with both hands scraping for purchase.
Mine. Mine. The one.
The wolf was already howling, clawing at the inside of my ribs. Mate, he roared, a sound that shook me to the marrow. Finally. The one we waited for. I gripped the foam wall, my fingers tearing the foam.
Five days, I answered him, my thoughts bitter with a sudden, vicious anger. She was right here. For five days we breathed the same air, and we didn’t know because of the cult’s poison. They stole almost a week of her from us.
Her scent had hit me—sweet rain, warm stone, and the thick, musk-heavy heat of a female coming into season.
It went straight to my groin, hardening my cock in an instant.
In the tiny calibration pod, her skin radiated.
When she climbed up my body, her mouth wet and desperate against mine, the wolf in me snapped its leash.
Every cell I owned screamed to rip that gray linen tunic off her shoulders, pin her wrists to the metal floor, and drive into her until we both went blind.
I wanted to sink myself into her, to mate her, to claim her on the floor of that pod and let the world burn.
But the mating bond would lock us together.
The bond magic would signal to the Verdant Order exactly what had happened and where we were.
We would be trapped, helpless, caught in the afterglow when the Wardens came.
If I didn’t get us out of that pod, I was going to lose my mind and ruin us both on that metal floor.
I tore my mouth from hers, my hands trembling as I grabbed her shoulders.
The wolf fought me, snapping, desperate. Claim. Mark her. Mate her. Now.
I white-knuckled her shoulders, pushing her away by inches and demanded the door code.
No, I snarled back at him. If we lock now, they trap us. We lose her. I am not losing her.
The bond was the realest thing in the universe. This was what Levi meant. Santos. Brann. Nadia’s potion had held it behind three feet of insulation. The insulation was gone now and I was standing in the full blast of the bond.
Five days. I’d stood next to my own soul for five days and hadn’t known—
And she was crying.
That was the thing that cut through the supernova in my chest. Kaia stood with her arms wrapped around her ribs, holding herself together, her face ruined. Shattered.
Because of me.
Because the first thing out of my mouth after she’d climbed up my body and kissed me like she was drowning had been a question about a door.
The bond howled.
The wolf whined, a low, broken sound in my chest. Comfort her. Drop. Throat to her hand. Show her the bond.
I wanted to.
I know, I told him. I will—
A chime sounded.
Not the soft tone they used for meals. This one came down through the stone in a long pulse, three notes, and then a recorded voice threaded after it, smooth as the lavender they pumped through the vents.
“All staff and patients to the central assembly to welcome our honored elders. The Inner Circle has arrived.”
The change in Kaia happened so fast it scared me.
The ruined woman folded away. The Steward came up over her like a second skin, spine snapping straight, hands unlocking from her ribs and dropping flat to her sides, chin leveling, and her wet face just—closed.
Sealed. Years of practice slamming a lid down over a fire.
“That’s the assembly bell.” Her voice came out scraped raw but pointed straight ahead, past me, at the slab.
“You need to return to your wing. They’ll do a roll.
If you’re not counted—” She stepped toward the door.
“I have to be on the floor when the Inner Circle arrives. We’ll find a way to leave after the assembly is over. Move, Thomas.”
She reached past me for the keypad.
And every animal instinct I had said—NO.
The wolf’s hackles went up, a hard rumble vibrating in my sternum. No. Do not let her. If she walks out, she walks into the teeth.
I got my body between her and the door before my brain finished the math.
The alarm was changing the air in this place.
I could taste it coming up through the vents, under the lavender, something cold and old and wrong, and the wolf knew before I did that whatever waited in that auditorium, I was not letting her walk into it.
“Don’t.” My hand hit the wall beside her head. “Don’t go in there.”
“That’s not a request you get to make. If we don’t show they’ll be after us before we’ve even set a foot off this place.” She didn’t look at me. Couldn’t, maybe. “Step aside.”
“Kaia.” Her name came out of me in a register I’d never used on her, low and wrecked, and it made her flinch. “What is the assembly? You said the Inner Circle is—what does that meant to you? What actually happens when they—”
“It’s a welcome.” She bit it off. “An honoring. The senior leadership gathers the community to receive the visitors. Everyone attends. There is no version of tonight where everyone does not attend, and there is no version where I’m caught standing in a sublevel calibration booth with a guest after curfew while the Inner Circle is on the floor, so for the love of grace, Thomas, move. ”
The visitors. The Inner Circle. I knew them as the architects of this horror—those most culpable for harvesting dormant wolf shifters.
I thought about Miller’s voice through the door.
I thought about an auditorium full of cuffed potential, marched in single file to be welcomed by the supernatural creatures who ran a three-hundred-year-old grinder, and I made a decision I had no right to make, not with my pack waiting for my intel to burn this place down and save all the dormants Santos’ map said were concentrated here, somewhere.
I made it anyway.
I dropped the act.
All of it. The loose California shoulders, the busted-radar grin, the whole costume Nadia had stitched me into—I let it fall off in the dark, and I watched Kaia register the difference, watched her actually take a half-step back from whatever was standing in front of her now.
“Okay. Okay, I need you to listen to me, and I need you to keep your face exactly the way it is right now while you do it, because you’re so good at that, you’re the best I’ve ever seen, so do that thing.
” The words came fast, too fast, tumbling out the way they always did when I was scared past my own bottom.
“I know this is the worst possible time. I know that. Usually a guy buys you dinner before he tells you the universe forged your souls out of the same fire, you get an appetizer at minimum, but the cult bells are ringing so we’re skipping straight to the part where I tell you I am not a dormant.
I’m not from a busted bloodline. I’ve been dropping a witch’s brew under my tongue every twelve hours to mask what I am, but it just wore off, which is why my eyes are doing the thing they’re doing, don’t scream—”
“Your eyes.” Barely a breath.
The wolf pushed to the front, eager. Show her. Let her see us.
I blinked, letting the gold flood my eyes fully. We are showing her, I told him. Every bit of us.
“I’m a wolf, Kaia. An active one. A regional—it doesn’t matter. I came in here on purpose. I came to find the floor under this building and burn the whole operation down to the dirt, because they’ve taken so many of us, and there are so many more like them in these walls, and you—”
My voice cracked clean down the middle and I let it.
“You have a wolf. A wolf you’ve kept as a secret.
But more than that, you are my mate. The real thing.
The fated thing your religion tells you is the disease.
You’re not the disease. You’re the cure, you’re my cure, and I spent five days not knowing it because of a witch’s potion, and I am so sorry I didn’t say this sooner, I’m so sorry, I’d take it back if I could but there’s no time, the bells are ringing and I am not letting you walk into that room. So you’re coming with me. Right now.”
She stared at me. I watched her thoughts hit the wall of what I’d just said and shatter against it, and her mouth opened, and nothing came out.
“I—” She shook her head.
“Feel it.” I caught her hand. Pressed it flat to my chest over the slamming drum of my heart. “You felt it when you kissed me. Same rhythm. Your wolf knows me, Kaia. She’s known me since the intake desk. No matter how long you’ve kept this secret, it’s out now. It can’t be taken back.’’
The wolf pressed up against the touch. She feels us. The same thread.
I squeezed her hand and felt her cuff and mine. Suddenly the metal became unbearable and I ripped both our cuffs away.
Her fingers spread against my chest. Just for a second. And something behind her eyes—the thing she’d been holding underwater—came up close enough to the surface that I saw it move.
Then the chime hit again, sharper, and the recorded voice said final call, and footsteps started somewhere above us, a lot of them.
“We have to go.” I closed my hand around hers. “I’m sorry. Talk later. Run now.”
“Tommy—”
“Now.”
I pulled. She came—stumbling, dragged, protesting under her breath—and I hit the slab control with my free hand and we went out into the stone corridor at a dead run, away from the assembly, the wrong direction, the only direction I’d let us go.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The sublevels were a maze, but Kaia knew them, and that was the only reason we didn’t dead-end.
She fought me for the first thirty feet and then some piece of her made a decision, because her hand turned in mine and gripped back, and she said, “left, the maintenance stair, not the main one.” And I followed her instructions into the dark.